Ronit Elkabetz, Acclaimed Israeli Film Star and Director, Dies at 51

Ronit Elkabetz, an Israeli actress and director whose searing performances as a disturbed woman with magical powers, a restaurant owner in a lonely desert town and a divorced woman mired in a hopeless love affair, earned her three Ophir Awards, the Israeli equivalent of an Oscar, died on Tuesday in Tel Aviv. She was 51.

The cause was cancer, said her agent, Perry Kafri.

Ms. Elkabetz, an Israeli of Moroccan origin, had a range that drew comparisons to Meryl Streep, the intensity of Maria Callas and, with her pale skin and raven hair, the haunting, sorrowful presence of Anna Magnani.

Israeli audiences got their first look at her in the 1990 film “The Appointed,” in which she played Oshra, a modern-day sorceress in Galilee who could create fires with her psychic powers.

She worked steadily thereafter for top directors and, with her younger brother Shlomi Elkabetz, wrote and directed the trilogy “To Take a Wife” (2004), “Shiva” (also called “Seven Days,” 2008) and “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” (2015). In all three films, based on the unhappy marriage of her Moroccan immigrant parents, she played the role of Viviane, like her mother a hairdresser married to a deeply religious and conservative postal worker. Looking toward the 2016 Academy Awards, the New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis proposed Ms. Elkabetz for best actress for her performance in “Gett.”

In the late 1990s, after moving to Paris to study under Ariane Mnouchkine with the avant-garde company Théâtre du Soleil, Ms. Elkabetz began making French films, including the 2001 comedy-drama “Origine Contrôlée,” released in the United States as “Made in France,” and the 2010 André Techiné film “The Girl on the Train,” with Catherine Deneuve and Michel Blanc.

Audiences and critics found her screen presence spellbinding.

“Moviegoers can admire Ronit Elkabetz or recoil from her, or admire and recoil at the same time,” the critic Uri Klein wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2008. “Ignoring her is not an option. The mystery and the exoticism, the threat and the danger have ultimately gathered into a potent presence and cogent control.”

Ronit Elkabetz (pronounced ROE-neet EL-ka-bets) was born on Nov. 27, 1964, in Bersheeba and grew up in the northern town of Kiryat Yam. After completing her compulsory military service, she found modeling work and was preparing to enroll in Israel’s main fashion-design school when she auditioned for what she thought was a commercial. It was actually a film, “The Appointed,” to be directed by Daniel Wachsmann.

“When they called me back to say I’d been chosen for the part, I realized that up until then I had been homeless in my own life, and that now I had found my roof,” she told the French newspaper Libération in 1999.

Her career took off with “Sh’chur” (“White Magic”), in which she played the older sister in an immigrant Moroccan family bound to a superstitious form of religion that included white magic. Her performance in the film, Israel’s official entry for best foreign-language film at the 1994 Academy Awards, won her an Ophir for best supporting actress.

“Like many old-time movie stars, whom Elkabetz evokes more than any previous Israeli film actress, there is something in her appearance that links the beautiful and the ugly and the feminine and the masculine,” Mr. Klein wrote. Her voice, too, set her apart, he wrote, seeming to emanate “from a far deeper place than most voices.”

She won a best-actress Ophir in 2001 for her performance in “Late Marriage” as a divorced woman in love with a Georgian immigrant whose tradition-minded parents set about destroying the relationship.

Her third Ophir was for “The Band’s Visit,” about a group of touring Egyptian musicians who wind up, by accident, in a remote town in the Negev, where the character played by Ms. Elkabetz takes them in.

Ms. Elkabetz’s dual French-Israeli career began when her performance as the dancer Martha Graham in the play “Martha” impressed the directors of “Made in France,” who offered her the part of Sonia, a woman seeking a sex-change operation.

French audiences, who saw in her a kind of successor to Fanny Ardant, succumbed to the same spell as Israelis. She appeared in the French films “Ashes and Blood” (2009), directed by Ms. Ardant; “Turk’s Head” (2010), a thriller; and “Free Hands” (2010).

In addition to her brother Shlomi, she is survived by her husband, the architect Avner Yashar; two children, Omri and Shalimar; two other brothers, Yechiel and Asi; and her parents, Miriam and Eli.

Charles Tesson, the artistic director of the program Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival, called her “an indispensable figure” in an interview with Agence France-Presse. He added, “She is responsible, in no small measure, for the richness of Israeli cinema that we have seen at Cannes for years.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Ronit Elkabetz, 51, Israeli Film Actress. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe